This series features four essays on comics and the speculative imagination in the classroom and ethnographic field research. The authors, who met in a seminar on graphic ethnography and comics as research, explain how comics have helped us reimagine new forms of pedagogy, translating field notes into teachable moments, and how comics as a medium lends itself to the kinds of speculation we see our interlocutors doing in the field. 

In the opening essay, the authors describe what they have learned as anthropologists making ethnographic comics, and highlight how comics lend themselves to engaging with speculation as a widespread, creative, and politically charged practice. 

Next, Adam Rosenblatt demonstrates how he uses comics, in the classroom and workshops for researchers, to facilitate meaningful, ethically complex conversations with the “impossible interlocutors” we encounter in our research: whether dead, nonhuman, inanimate, or otherwise. 

Federico Dupont Bernal shows how sketching and graphic ethnography become a methodology for grappling with speculation itself. Following professional sports gamblers in Colombia, his own sketchbook became a space to think through ideas that writing alone could not hold.

Lastly, Joanna Marbaniang describes how the process of a collaborative comics project can turn into a site for speculation. Working collaboratively with an interlocutor, the essay calls attention to the process of collaboration to examine why some speculative worlds mean more than others.